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Andrew Hearst

Andrew Hearst is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the proprietor of the blog Panopticist.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New York Sun, Print, Metropolis, Lingua Franca, Book, and many other publications.

If you search YouTube for videos of Don DeLillo, you won’t find much. The author of White Noise and Underworld is not a public man, and he rarely does tours or events. But an enterprising fan known as the Donologist has been uploading DeLillo radio interviews to YouTube. The presentation of these interview clips leaves…

From the outbreak of World War I until a few years after it, German and Austrian savings banks, municipalities, and other institutions tried to sidestep rampant inflation by printing local currencies known as notgeld, German for “emergency money” or “necessity money.” Flamboyantly designed and wildly colorful, the bills were soon coveted by collectors, and they…

I love this great ad from a Jakarta shopping center. It’s the work of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Give it a closer look if the clever gimmick isn’t immediately apparent: Via: Environmental Graffiti.

The talented New York-based monologuist Mike Daisey performs his dark, hilarious work in a format similar to the one perfected by the late Spalding Gray: a spare stage, a simple table, a glass of water, and some notes. Daisey, who is an acquaintance of mine, just got back from a remote South Pacific island called…

Gary Hustwit’s first film, the smart 2007 documentary HELVETICA explored the 50-year history of that iconic typeface and the countless ways it’s shaped Western visual culture. To the joy of design nerds everywhere, Hustwit’s second film, OBJECTIFIED, is starting to make the rounds of film festivals, and it will be released later this year. OBJECTIFIED…

A brilliant graphic designer and illustrator known as Spacesick has been making a series of hilarious, pitch-perfect book cover mashups and posting them on Flickr. He takes a classic or contemporary film and recreates it as a vintage-paperback movie novelization. They’re conceptually brilliant, and his Photoshop technique is ace. Here’s the full set, and below…

Death Cab for Cutie’s 2008 album Narrow Stairs didn’t immediately grab me the way their last two discs did, but I’ve come to really like it. The one song I unequivocally loved on first listen was “Grapevine Fires,” a haunting, beautifully paced track about the effects of the 2007 Southern California wildfires. Death Cab’s Ben…

For anyone who cares about the implosion of the journalism business and how it might evolve to save itself, the writings of New York University professor Clay Shirky are a must-read. His recent blog post “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” has been widely linked to, and if you missed it, here’s a taste: “When someone…

Spike Jonze’s adaptation of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE has been in the works for years, and it’s being readied for an October release. The first official trailer appeared on the web today, and it’s really promising. The script is by Dave Eggers, and the cast includes Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, Lauren Ambrose, and James…